Alfie Kohn (b. October 15, 1957) is an American author and lecturer who has explored a number of topics in education, parenting, and human behavior. He is considered a leading figure in progressive education and has also offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research.

Kohn’s challenges to widely accepted theories and practices have made him a controversial figure, particularly with behaviorists, conservatives, and those who defend the specific practices he calls into question, such as the use of competition, incentive programs, conventional discipline, standardized testing, grades, homework, and traditional schooling.

Kohn was born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. He earned a B.A. from Brown University in 1979, having created his own interdisciplinary course of study, and an M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago. Kohn has taught at the high school and college levels in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and lives in the Boston area with his wife and two children. He works as an independent scholar and is not currently affiliated with any institution.

Kohn’s ideas on education would currently be described as progressive and have been influenced by the works of John Dewey and Jean Piaget. He believes in a constructivist account of learning in which the learner is seen as actively making meaning rather than absorbing information, and he argues that knowledge should be taught “in a context and for a purpose.” Kohn has also written that learning should be organized around “problems, projects, and questions -- rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines.” Along with this belief, Kohn feels that students should have an active voice in the classroom with the ability to have a meaningful impact on the curriculum, structure of the room, and any necessary discipline measures, among other things.

Kohn has been critical of several aspects of traditional schooling. Classroom management and discipline are, in Kohn’s view, focused more on eliciting compliance than on helping students become caring, responsible problem-solvers. He has also denounced the effects of the test-driven “accountability” movement — in general, but particularly on low-income and minority students — arguing that “the more poor children fill in worksheets on command (in an effort to raise their test scores), the further they fall behind affluent kids who are more likely to get lessons that help them understand ideas.” More recently, Kohn has been critical of the place homework holds in the American classroom, noting that research does not support claims of any benefit to homework, academically or otherwise.

While Unconditional Parenting (2005) is Kohn’s first book that deals primarily with the topic of raising children, he devoted two chapters to this question in Punished by Rewards (1993). He discusses the need for parents to keep in mind their long-term goals for their children, such as helping them grow into responsible and caring people, rather than on short-term goals, such as obedience. The key question, he argues, is “What do kids need — and how do we meet those needs?”

Toward that end, Kohn argues for an approach he calls “working with,” as distinguished from “doing to.” The latter is exemplified by punishments and rewards, and, more generally, a focus on behavior rather than on the motives and values that underlie behavior.

One of Kohn’s most widely circulated articles is “Five Reasons to Stop Saying ‘Good Job!’” which argues that praise, like other forms of extrinsic inducements, tends to undermine children’s commitment to whatever they were praised for doing (i.e. children are taught to do things in order to get praise rather than do the things because it is right to do so, or because it is enjoyable to do so). Later, he expanded this critique to suggest that positive reinforcement, like certain forms of punitive “consequences,” amount to forms of conditional parenting, in which love is made contingent on pleasing or obeying the parent.

Two of Kohn’s books, No Contest (1986) and Punished by Rewards (1993), addressed competition and “pop behaviorism” in workplaces as well as in families and schools. Both attracted considerable attention in business circles, particularly when the late W. Edwards Deming, known for inspiring the Quality movement in organizations, endorsed both books. Kohn spoke at many conferences on management and at individual corporations, primarily during the 1990s, and his work was debated in the Harvard Business Review, CFO Magazine, the American Compensation Association Journal, and other publications. At one point he was described as “America’s most biting critic of money as motivator."

Kohn has published a total of eleven books. This includes five on issues in education (e.g. homework, standardized testing, grades, teaching styles), two on discipline, one on parenting and three on general topics (e.g. human nature, competition, motivation). His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

No Contest: The Case Against Competition (Houghton Mifflin, 1986/1992)

You Know What They Say...: The Truth About Popular Beliefs (HarperCollins, 1990)

The Brighter Side of Human Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life (Basic Books, 1990)

Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason.

No Grades + No Homework = Better Learning.

Kohn has written hundreds of articles for academic journals, popular magazines, and newspapers, many of which are available on his website. Among the publications to which he has contributed are The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Parents, and a variety of education periodicals.

“The real alternative to being Number One is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether” -- [No Contest, chap. 9]

“It doesn’t matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated” — [“The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” Chronicle of Higher Education]

“Rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much” -- [Punished by Rewards, chap. 4]

“Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions” — [The Homework Myth, chap. 10]

“The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child.” — [“Unconditional Teaching,” Educational Leadership]